[For another take, see Paul Raeburn's post on this story here.]
A veteran news writer calls our attention to Part I of an occasional series on the future of NASA, and notes also that it is "on our new template, so it has more bells and whistles than usual."
- Wash. Post – Joel Achenbach: NASA's Mission Improbable ; The lede is on a dogie-roping exercise better than most of the stuff, except maybe barrel racing, you'll see at a rodeo. This is NASA's scripting of a mission to a small asteroid in near-earth orbit with a robotic butterfly net thing. It'd get drug back to lunar orbit so astronauts and who knows maybe some of those entrepreneurial space rocketeer mining company people to look over. But that venture is in the piece just to introduce the newer, smaller, cheaper, not so faster NASA and the agency's tiresomely long quest to find missions that bring honor to its legacy and also bring so much Congressional enthusiasm it has enough budget to do them right.
The 'new template' is handsome, with easy to expand graphics, an eye-popping screen filling opening photo (of, evocatively, an empty old launch pad), and multi-media features readily at hand. Achenbach's copy has its usual easy, amused and just slightly insouciant style. He writes, for instance:
NASA is in a tricky position, trying to improvise a coherent strategy for human spaceflight even as political winds have shifted dramatically. If NASA is lurching along these days, that’s in part because the agency has been jerked around.
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